There are tours de force and there are Tours de France, and sometimes Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games is both.
His new book from Unreason Press is a landmark history of the evolution of Dungeons and Dragons, firmly rooting it as a game that drew on the experiences of the wargame community in the 1960s and 1970s and one whose earliest ancestors stretch back centuries earlier. As a book on game design and game history, Peterson’s tome is going to be an essential resource if only for his painstaking research and copious citations.
It is also a book with valleys, mountains and few stretches of really easy going. Even familiar material is presented in sometimes numbing detail, and some of the detours seem better suited to other works or articles. Just when you hit a great pace, things can bog down in a slough of pain and self-doubt. Playing at the World is encyclopedic in its reach, and that reach swallows almost everything.
PatW opens with a quick rundown of the history of Avalon Hill, and how its wargame magazine and American communities spawned partnerships, debates and game sessions that led directly to Gygax and Arneson making D&D. (Well, strictly speaking, Gygax was adapting Arneson’s Blackmoor games which were a role playing version of Gygax’s fantasy Chainmail battle rules. It’s a complicated history, but Peterson clearly, and I think correctly, implies Gygax deserves most of the credit for making Arneson’s games ‘systematic’).
From this history, Peterson moves back to examine the different characteristics of D&D and where these ideas came from. So we are treated to a discourse on the history of medieval fantasy literature and books about treasure hunts. We get thoughtful musings on how to evaluate Gygax’s debt to Tolkien. The birth of weapon systems, how to calculate certain types of odds before the arrival of mass produced polyhedric dice, the long and fascinating story of wargaming in both military and civilian settings and how this simulation vs game divide would shake out in the 50s and 60s, the role of the DM or referee or umpire or what-have-you…this is a book that leaves no stone unturned in its quest to connect all the dots and provide the ultimate genealogy of the world’s most successful pen and paper role playing game.
The research present in this book is beyond impressive. Not content with simply listing games that existed or their mechanics, Peterson digs into old gaming journals, memoirs and designer notes. He notes aggressive almost proto-Fascist boasts of gaming clubs that took out ads in early issues of The General. He quotes comments from game designers that demonstrate they were either reinventing the wheel or completely unfamiliar with other games. The history of how the War Game Digest came apart because the editorial team could not agree on whether they should argue for more “realism” or more “fun” is told. None of these things are strictly necessary for his purpose, which is to tie D&D (and consequently, almost every RPG system since) to its wargame/simulation past. Everyone knows it came out of Chainmail – Peterson wants to explain where Chainmail came from.
And that means a history of miniatures and toy soldiers, including their availability, their use in Wells’s Little Wars and so on and so on until we reach Chess. At which point you realize it is turtles all the way down.
The scope ends up being so broad that it’s almost like doing a family history and bragging that you are descended from Henry V of England – even if that is so, you probably share that with millions and millions of other people. The family tree is broad and tall and almost anything can be connected to the phenomenon that D&D became.
But even if some of the threads get lost in the history, Peterson skillfully reminds us that games happen in a cultural setting. The ones that survive are rare, but even the lost ones (like Robert Louis Stevenson’s wargame, which was never written down or described in any detail) speak to interest in the topic, the question of what these sorts of games say about their players and what the world at large thinks about (mostly) men playing at war.
And some of the connections are so obvious that I never even thought of them until they were written down. The Dungeon Master, for example, is tasked with interpreting rules and making sure all is played out properly. Refereed wargames in simulation rooms clearly predated the DM, but Peterson also connects it to the role of the referee in more chronologically contiguous play-by-mail games like Diplomacy; he/she is there to make sure that orders are correct, that everything is legal, and to play out the new situation for the players. The DM, of course, adds story telling, building the new world – something Arneson did in his Blackmoor games while Tolkien (new in paperback) was still sweeping the US.
When I compare Play at the World to less successful gaming history texts, like Barton’s Dungeons & Desktops, it’s clear evidence that this is the sort of project that is very difficult to do and very hard to see becoming a smash hit. Peterson doesn’t ‘review’ the games he lists, but he does offer critical commentary on design choices while situating them within a game design and cultural context. Peterson doesn’t list every minor Avalon Hill game that Gygax and Arneson would have played, but he is not afraid to remind us of how small AH’s audience was when it started and how unlikely it would have been to find like minded adults in many American cities.
Because this history is not, then, a simple list of Things That Happened, its detours and digressions are more excusable, even as they frustrate a little. Is it necessary to go through the historical meanings of ‘goblin’ or have details on an obscure naval wargame that may be one of the origins of Hit Points and THAC0? Of course not – each of these are interesting on their own, but the book would lose nothing if these bits were saved for another time.
But here they are and they give amateur gaming historians like myself something to ask questions about. It’s not always possible to skip these digressions – Peterson covers ground at a courier’s pace and will leave you behind if you’re not good with names and concepts. Still, the book might be a little less compelling if it didn’t at least try to deal with these sidebars.
Playing at the World is a triumph, but not for the faint of heart. 600 pages of often heavy text, 100 page bibliography, and footnotes besides. Even if you know much of the history it covers, having this material in one place with some deft judgments about the connections and influences makes the book invaluable.
Buy it. If you dare.
(Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games was provided for free by Unreason Press.)